I am helping out for a dance concert Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 4:30pm at the Henry St John Gymnasium at the Corner of Clinton St and Geneva St, Ithaca NY.

See ya there.

I am really eager to own a house. I would actually enjoy doing home improvement and gardening. It’s hard to get excited about doing these things with a rental. I am in the process of buying a house in Ithaca, NY and I will stay at least two years, possibly more.

I came across some articles on home prices — http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi.html it appears that prices do not descend that much, and they tend to decline in large markets. I expect that the Ithaca market will stay flat at worst, since Ithaca is growing as a high-tech city.

Here’s some data on historical evidence of home price booms and busts: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi_table1.pdf

These downturns tend to follow years of stagnant or negative economic activity. http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi_table2.pdf

I heard that the free dating website Plenty of Fish brings in 3 million dollars in advertising revenue per year, and I thought it would be interesting to make a more techno-savvy approach to personal questionnaires. I had the idea of letting people tag themselves, and then presenting a taglist ala del.icio.us. Then I had the idea of an interactive body type diagram, using the outline of a person (a curve) that could be manipulated, and clothing templates that would conform to the contours of the outlined body. This could be fun and could bring in some ad revenue from clothing sites.

I then realized that I could define a parametric space from a small set of obtained body images. This is more complex, and there has been research in this area.

I like that the first proposal is simple and abstractly oriented.

There’s been a lotta talking about community on the web. Seems that some people have the idea that creating an appealing, nurturing, challenging, warm community is difficult and requires a new set of web-based social cues. These people would be right.

There’s a lot of psychology research into the dynamics of attraction and intimacy. One thing that has always stood out for me about attraction is what I term the danger level - the danger of intimacy. Often I think that for people with avoidant-ambivalent attachment styles, interacting one on one is easier and sometimes there is something to be said for transgressive behavior. I almost got involved in editing and expanding some silly original analysis on wikipedia of the movie American Beauty — and it felt sort of comfortable. You’re not supposed to put original analysis on wikipedia.

One of the things that Eclipse had, and lost, was ftp file transfer. I don’t really do ftp transfer anymore. I do a lot of ’svn commit’ then ’svn update’ on a different machine (or a svn hook script), and on occasion I use sftp.

But I still need to sync over ftp for some projects. And the eclipse plugin was several years old and targeted an ancient version.

Now, from Aptana, the people who took over RadRails, is ftp functionality.

http://www.radrails.org/docs/index.php/Transferring_Files_with_FTP

I am blogging some more serious content — content that will be carefully edited over time. I need version control. Wordpress stores pages and posts in the database — making it hard to version content. Sure, you could store old versions, and write a bunch of custom software to diff recordsets. I have a better idea — store content on the filesystem. Then you can use subversion. DB storage is nonstandardized.

I’m going to start learning a RubyOnRails blogging package — whichever one I think is going to be dominant. I’m not sure if it’s Typo or Mephisto, or something else.

I hope that whatever tool I choose, it saves posts in the filesystem.

I know at least one tool that saves posts in the filesystem — blosxom does — this software is being used by a bunch of the pragmatic programmers people. Downside — it’s perl, and probably it doesn’t have the nouveau web services support that WordPress and the emerging ROR platforms have.

I may look into hacking WordPress to save content where I want it to be saved. One person has posted a plugin that stores versions in the database, but it’s old. Another has posted a plugin that allows you to insert a tag in the content pane that links to a text file on disk. Of these, I like the first solution best since it lets me keep editing in WordPress and by using ScribeFire.

A while ago I was having trouble with this — the answer is, don’t install Fedora. Install OpenSuse 10.2. It’s very similar and the support for Oracle is better. And it doesn’t have Anaconda.

Thanks to digg, I have added visitors from Australia and South America to my loyal readers from North America, Europe and Asia. I am still waiting on readers from Africa (preferably Botswana) and Greenland (standing in for Antarctica).